It was 1885 when Friedrich Trump first left Bad Dürkheim, in Germany’s western Palatinate region, for the United States. Now, 140 years later, the populist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party wants to make his grandson President Donald Trump an honorary citizen of the district.
Although the symbolic gesture seems likely to fail in a vote by the local council, which is controlled by mainstream conservatives, the attempt to honor the U.S. president is the latest AfD overture to the Trump administration and its supporters. Some AfD members see common cause with Trump and Vice President JD Vance, and their crusade against “wokeism” and antipathy toward migrants.
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“With Trump, the whole foreign policy of the U.S. changed,” said Johannes Hillje, a political consultant and expert on far-right populism. “And now, the policy of the U.S. and also the domestic policies are much closer to the AfD.”
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Leading the AfD’s recent transatlantic charm offensive is deputy party leader Beatrix von Storch, who met U.S. officials — including representatives from the Domestic Policy Council, the Office of the Vice President, the National Security Council, and the State Department — during a surprise visit to Washington last month.
Von Storch, the granddaughter of Adolf Hitler’s finance minister, described the talks as “very open, constructive, and goal-oriented.”
“They already know that the AfD is the party that broadly aligns with the Trump administration’s policies,” she said in an interview with Swiss broadcaster Kontrafunk. She also cited common ground “against Islamization, against migration, against woke culture.”
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Von Storch’s visit was quickly followed up by federal lawmakers Markus Frohnmaier and Jan Wenzel Schmidt meeting with senior Trump adviser Darren Beattie in Washington to “explain the goals of an AfD foreign policy, to promote cooperation, and to shed light on the activities of the CDU,” Frohnmaier wrote on X.
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